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To find out how healthy people were in Prehistoric people were they would look at bone samples, bone density and texture and quality of their teeth. Archaeologists can also look at the kinds of things by investigating preserved stomach contents and earth core samples. A local farmer was digging in his garden and he come across another room and inside it was a tomb of skulls, the whole floor was covered in human skulls! This is known as the Tomb of the Eagles at Isbister. We can also look at the lifestyle of the Aborigines whose beliefs and ways of life have not changed for centuries. If we found out how Aborigines approached medicine and health until they were changed by outside influences, then we can get some clues about how Prehistoric people might have treated the sick, or what they thought were the causes of disease.
In the Prehistoric times people used to die from: Diseases that could not be stopped from spreading especially amongst young children as they developed resistance to them, Infections from everyday accidents such as a cut finger which easily led to blood poisoning, people also died of blood loss as it was hard to stop deep cuts from bleeding. Very often people died from a unsuccessful Trephining operation. Few men reached the age of 40. Even fewer women reached the age of 40 because of the high death-rate amongst women in childbirth. The skulls of women and babies have often been found together.
A cure would be to carry a lucky charm around with you that would scare off any evil spirits. The treatments available in the Prehistoric times a cause of an illness would be having an evil spirit inside you and the cure for that would be trephining where they would drill a hole in your head to let the evil spirit out.
During the Prehistoric times if you were sick you would go to the Medicine man. He would get the patient to lie down and then he would start to chant so that the patient would fall into a trance. The medicine man would bend over the sick body and start massaging the sore or sick place. Finally he would ask the evil spirit to come out and then it did!
Healers in the Prehistoric times couldn’t really help people who were sick, because the Trephining operations were not often successful and the lucky charms are just a superstition and supernatural. However they did have some herbal medicines that helped and are still used today in some parts of the world.